Ruins : classical theater and broken memory / Odai Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Odai, 1959- author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), issuing body.

Series:

Theater--theory/text/performance

Theater - theory/text/performance

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--Greece--History--To 500.

Theater.

Greece.

History.

Theater--Rome--History--To 500.

Greek drama--History and criticism.

Greek drama.

Greek literature--History and criticism.

Greek literature.

Classical drama--History and criticism.

Classical drama.

Classical literature--History and criticism.

Classical literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (340 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, [2018]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence: all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on "how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.

Contents:

1 Domesticating Dionysus p. 23

2 The Fining of Phrynichus: Shaping Memory and Genre in Athens p. 46

3 Broken Shards and Buried Barbs: Ostracism and Weaponized Comedy p. 64

4 The Serene Face of Menander; or, "The Dipper Dipped" p. 80

5 Unspeakable Histories: Terror, Spectacle, and Genocidal Memory on the Roman Stage p. 105

6 Mapping Rome: Becoming Togati p. 123

7 Mapping Rome: Shitting on Romans p. 156

8 Mapping Rome: Rules for Borrowing Memory p. 169

9 Savage Cuisine / The City of Always p. 180

10 Antiquity's Last Supper p. 203

11 The Damnatio of the Gods: Theater and Resistance in the Pagan Holocaust p. 234.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 296-339) and index.

Description based on information from publisher.

ISBN:

9780472124398

0472124390

OCLC:

1076274085

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.